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(Chrissy, “If Trump wins the presidency again, the rule of law is over in the US,” 16 Aug. 2023, https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/trump-desantis-republican-candidate-presidential-election//ghs-arc)

But what’s especially troubling about Trump as the likely Republican presidential candidate is the open and brazen contempt that both he and his supporters have for the rule of law. The US establishment seems completely unprepared to deal with the possibility that Trump could take office even if still on trial, or convicted, of . These include conspiring to defraud the US government and obstructing an official proceeding, both in connection with the 6 January insurrection and his attempts to remain in office despite losing the 2020 election. Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro followed the 6 January playbook when he tried – unsuccessfully – to remain in power after losing the Brazilian election in July 2022. Less than a year later, he was , justifiably and sensibly, from running for office until 2030. This hasn’t happened to Trump, as the United States has no clear mechanism in place for taking such action, which seems like a serious oversight on the part of the founding fathers. The truth is, we’re in uncharted waters with the potential to elect a president facing criminal trials. Here, pundits simply when asked whether a president convicted of a crime can pardon himself, or about what a “” it ostensibly sets to hold an ex-president accountable for his crimes, because the optics create the impression that the justice system is being weaponised against the political party that is out of power. Incidentally, it is legally clear that Trump cannot pardon himself for state crimes, and Trump is one of 19 alleged conspirators a grand jury in Georgia charged on Monday night with attempting to overturn the 2020 election results in that state. Should Trump be convicted and sentenced to prison time and yet still elected president, what happens? Since we’re not entirely sure, my guess is that between the feckless Democratic leadership, the illegitimately stacked, right-wing Supreme Court, and the authoritarian Republicans, his sentence will be suspended so that he can go back to work in Washington. While it will thus be crucial for the future of American democracy to reelect Biden, the privileged pundits’ concerns about the “bad precedent” entailed in indicting and convicting a former president are fundamentally misplaced. So is the Biden administration’s parallel belief that restoring fairness to the Supreme Court by adding seats (to counter the illegitimate stacking of the court by the right) would forever. In the case of the Supreme Court, it’s too late – it’s already been politicised, and undoing that would create a less partisan court more in line with democratic norms. Similarly, Trump and the radicalised Republican Party have already undermined Americans’ faith in the fairness of the federal government, and the only way to begin restoring that faith is for the rule of law and democracy to prevail. Once again the problem has come from the authoritarian American right, which does not value equal protection under the law. Trump and those around him deliberately seek to weaken faith in our system by spewing a flood of disinformation about a ‘stolen’ election and the supposed crimes of his political opponents. They understand that, under post-truth conditions, politics comes down purely to power. Since 2016, Trump rallies have regularly featured chants of “lock her up!” – referring to Hillary Clinton. Trump has embraced these chants and thus already signalled his intention to corrupt and weaponise our country’s justice system. We can’t create a deterrent to such behaviour by not holding Trump accountable. Clearly, our founding fathers’ vision for how to hold presidents accountable for crimes (impeachment by the House of Representatives followed by an impeachment trial in the Senate) is unworkable. None of the three US presidents to have been impeached – Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton and Trump (impeached twice) – has ever been convicted.Trump’s second impeachment, for incitement to insurrection, took place at the very end of his term, after 6 January 2021. Remarkably, even in this period of deep partisan divides, ten House Republicans voted to impeach him, and seven Republican senators voted to convict him. But the Republicans who sided against Trump have faced the wrath of their party, and the two thirds majority of senators required for conviction is an impossibly high threshold. Donald Trump has a real chance to win in 2024. While he would almost certainly lose the popular vote, as he did in 2016, our country’s not-fit-for-purpose electoral college system is a different matter and could bring him victory based on how the populations of so-called ‘swing’ states vote. Both Trump and Biden are pretty unpopular with the American public at present, polling almost the same in terms of favourability, at 41% and 43% respectively. If Trump does win, we will end up with a nightmare scenario for the rule of law – a scenario that our political establishment seems utterly unprepared to address effectively. If he wins, it seems likely that Trump will succeed in significantly further eroding the institutions and norms that are meant to place checks on his power, ushering in an era of American authoritarianism for the foreseeable future. That’s what makes the prospect of a second Trump presidency so concerning.

Thankfully, those predictions turned out to be wrong. There are multiple reasons for that, but one big one — one that also helped keep relations between other historical enemies, like South Korea and Japan, peaceful — is a shared participation in US alliance networks. The US serves as the ultimate security blanket, preventing these countries from having to build up their own armaments and thus risk a replay of World War I. But if American alliance commitments become and remain less credible, it’s possible this order could crack up. America’s partners aren’t stupid. They understand that Trump is the product of deep forces in American politics, and that his victory might not be a one-off. If they think that this won’t be the last “America First” president in modern history, depending on America the way that they have in the past could quickly become a nightmare. The worst-case scenarios for a collapse in the US alliance system are terrible. Imagine full Japanese and German rearmament, alongside rapid-fire proliferation of nuclear weapons. Imagine a crack-up of NATO, with European powers at loggerheads while Russia gobbles up the Baltic states and the rest of Ukraine. Imagine South Korea’s historical tensions with Japan reigniting, and a war between those two countries or any combination of them and China. All of this seems impossible to imagine now, almost absurd. And indeed, in the short run, it is. There is no risk — zero — of American allies turning on each other in the foreseeable future. And it’s possible that the next president after Trump could reassure American allies that nothing like this could ever happen again. But the truth is that there’s just no way to know. When a fundamental force for world peace starts to weaken, no one can really be sure how well the system will hold up.

American global leadership is finished — much to Putin’s delight.

As for the use of military power abroad, Trump mostly favored withdrawals during his term (though he did authorize a drone strike to kill a key Iranian commander in Iraq in 2020 and, according to the Associated Press, considered an invasion of Venezuela in 2017). Trump wanted to pull U.S. troops out of South Korea, Germany and Somalia, but critics warned that those moves would be devastating to global security and alliances. A second term might see them come to pass, Feaver says: “There’s a higher likelihood that the president would take risky action, but they would be risky actions of retreat, or abandonment of allies … rather than invasions of countries, although downstream they could result in that.”

The recent SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which is causing COVID 19 disease, has taught us unexpected lessons about the dangers of human extinction through highly contagious and lethal diseases. As the COVID 19 pandemic is now being controlled by various isolation measures, therapeutics and vaccines, it became clear that our current lifestyle and societal functions may not be sustainable in the long term. We now have to start thinking and planning on how to face the next dangerous pandemic, not just overcoming the one that is upon us now. Is there any evidence that even worse pandemics could strike us in the near future and threaten the existence of the human race? The answer is unequivocally yes. It is not necessary to get infected by viruses of bats, pangolins and other exotic animals that live in remote forests in order to be in danger. Creditable scientific evidence indicates that the human gut microbiota harbor billions of viruses which are capable of affecting the function of vital human organs such as the immune system, lung, brain, liver, kidney, heart etc. It is possible that the development of pathogenic variants in the gut can lead to contagious viruses which can cause pandemics, leading to destruction of vital organs, causing death or various debilitating diseases such as blindness, respiratory, liver, heart and kidney failures. These diseases could result in the complete shutdown of our civilization and probably the extinction of human race. In this essay, I will first provide a few independent pieces of scientific facts and then combine this information to come up with some (but certainly not all) hypothetical scenarios that could cause human race misery, even extinction. I hope that these scary scenarios will trigger preventative measures that could reverse or delay the projected adverse outcomes.

The United States’ role in global health is also at stake. During his presidency, Trump pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization (WHO) and generally pursued isolationist policies, Levitt says. “Biden has done a lot to undo that, but we will likely see a slip back if Trump were elected again,” he says. Officials in the Biden administration have expressed their commitment to a global pandemic treaty — an agreement being negotiated among countries to help prevent the next global-health emergency. Meanwhile, Republicans have been critical of it, suggesting that it could be a threat to US intellectual-property rights, forcing companies to share vaccine and treatment know-how.

These pieces all rest heavily on the claim that Trump launched no new wars. That’s true as far as it goes. But it was certainly not for lack of trying. Trump might not have started any wars, but he massively inflamed existing ones—and came close to catastrophic new ones.

Let’s review the record. Despite inveighing against “endless wars,” Trump massively escalated the country’s existing wars in multiple theaters, leading to skyrocketing casualties. In Afghanistan, he substantially upped the amount of airstrikes, leading to a 330 percent increase in civilian deaths. In Yemen, he escalated both U.S. counterterrorism activities and support for the devastating Saudi-led war against the Houthis. According to the United Kingdom’s Bureau of Investigative Journalism, there were 2,243 drone strikes in just the first two years of Trump’s presidency, compared with 1,878 in the entire eight years of the Obama administration.

End civil liberties, reverse democracy, and cause a civil war.

Taylor ‘23 (Miles Taylor is the former chief of staff of the Department of Homeland Security, “Another Trump Presidency Would Be Even Worse Than You Think,” 07/12/23, https://time.com/6294052/new-trump-presidency-would-be-even-worse/, [AM]

Research by BlueLabs has shown that there is an “estimated 0.4%-2.3% bump in top-of-ticket vote share when every local state legislative seat within a precinct is challenged.” As noted above, in the 2024 elections, North Carolina Democrats are contesting nearly all state legislative seats. According to Heather Williams, President of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, “The bottom of the ticket is absolutely driving engagement and will for all levels of the ballot.”

The other way that a down-ballot candidate can have a substantial effect on other races such as the presidential is for the candidate to be especially good or especially bad. In North Carolina, the Republican Party nominated a far-right candidate named Mark Robinson. The Republican gubernatorial nominee has a long history of incendiary comments. In Facebook posts that are still up today, Robinson has perpetuated racist, antisemitic, homophobic, and transphobic stereotypes. In some cases, his extremist viewpoints position him to the right of former President Donald Trump. Robinson has peddled conspiracy theories ranging from denying the Holocaust to entertaining the idea that the 1969 moon landing was fake. He has advocated for a complete abortion ban without exceptions, but now denies that he said this. As a result of his far-right views and inflammatory rhetoric, Robinson has struggled to garner support outside of his conservative evangelical base—alienating moderate voters and anti-Trump Republicans. Democrats hope that his extreme views on abortion will galvanize voters to go to the polls, resulting in a “reverse coattails” effect that will lift Biden to victory in the state.

Though Donald Trump won North Carolina twice, 2020 was his narrowest victory in any state. He beat Joe Biden by 1.4 points, or around 75,000 votes. Seeing it as Mr. Biden's best pickup opportunity, the Biden campaign began targeting general election voters in the Tar Heel State during the primary with a $25 million TV ad campaign in seven battleground states that included North Carolina. Building a student coalition Clayton has been a key player in outreach to young voters, Biden officials said. "Every person that's leading a canvas right now in North Carolina is a young person," Clayton said. "Folks out there out on the doors right now in North Carolina are young people. In March, Clayton joined Vice President Kamala Harris in a "Students for Biden" coalition launch event in Durham. They helped train young North Carolinians on political organizing and Clayton says the state party is developing a pipeline that would hire eligible students for the campaign after they graduate "We want local North Carolina youth out there organizing for this campaign this year, because we fundamentally think that this is the way forward in our state," she said. Tarak Duggal, a senior at Wake Forest University, was one of the event's participants. "It is inspiring and helpful to see that, you know, the campaign is taking us seriously and is listening to us and understands how important of a voting bloc that young people are," Duggal told CBS News. Appalachian State is one of 16 institutions in the University of North Carolina network. The state is also home to about a dozen historically Black colleges. The Biden campaign believes the many HBCUs provide the perfect infrastructure to support their youth outreach strategy. The team is planning to open 11 North Carolina field offices this cycle that will include staffing focused on turning out campuses across the state.

Some of the most important findings from this study concerned individuals’ divergence of opinion on preferences for the strength of intellectual property rights. As reported above, being older, having lower income, being more educated, and having less intellectual property experience all correlate with a preference for stronger intellectual property protection. Figure 6 displays these effects graphically. This differentiation has important implications for several ongoing intellectual property debates.

The finding that younger people prefer weaker intellectual property rights is consistent with past studies that have found similar results when examining attitudes toward file sharing on the Internet.145 There does appear to be a generational divide concerning intellectual property protection. Interesting, here, is that most past research has focused on individual attitudes towards copyright protection, primarily in the context of the Internet, while the present study finds an age effect for the full population, across the patent and copyright conditions. This study appears to be the first to indicate that the generational divide concerning intellectual property rights cuts across intellectual property domains.

The rhetoric of the patent troll narrative has done a great job of decimating the U.S. patent system and has led to highly public character evisceration of legitimate inventors over and over and over and over again. To date, this writer can think of one example of an actual patent troll: MPHJ Technologies and the infamous abuse of the scan-to-email patent. That’s the one example of an entity who asserted patents in bad faith through thousands of demand letters without ever once filing a lawsuit. That’s clear extortion in an attempt to obtain thousands in licensing fees on a patent that probably didn’t have value if asserted in U.S. district court.

And yet, the specter of the patent troll bogeyman continues to be espoused by parties in the United States and abroad with very little regard of the dangerous nature of the term, and despite Obama era FTC saying the term is unhelpful and misleading.

In a relatively short period of time, the debate over patent reform has transformed an arcane, low-salience issue into one that sparks fierce controversy and national headlines. Listening to the recent flurry of Beltway-targeted ads, op-eds and press releases, it would be easy to get the impression that it’s also a partisan issue promoted by the left.

For example, our friends at the American Conservative Union recently called the reform effort “Obama’s initiative to weaken intellectual property rights” and promote the “liberal dream of a patent-free society.” Elsewhere, Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina likened it to Obamacare for intellectual property. Taking a closer look, this hyperbolic narrative doesn’t hold up very well to scrutiny.

“The copyright and patent laws we have today look more like intellectual monopoly than intellectual property,” wrote Brink Lindsey and Steven Teles in their recent book about the U.S. economy. Concerns about overprotection of intellectual property acting as a barrier to innovation and its diffusion are not new. But they have gained greater salience now that knowledge has emerged as a dominant driver of economic activity and competitive advantage.

Digital technologies have enabled the emergence of an “intangible economy,” based on soft assets like algorithms and lines of code, rather than physical assets like buildings and machinery. In this environment, intellectual-property rules can now make or break business models and reshape societies, as they determine how economic gains are shared.

In a world where intellectual property rights have become significantly more prevalent, important, and contentious, the experiments reported here shed new light on the popular understanding of intellectual property law and intellectual property rights. This study has significant implications for intellectual property law and policy, as the intellectual property system is premised on producing a certain set of behavioral effects. The results of this study indicate that the behavioral model of incentives on which the intellectual property system is based cannot function optimally because popular conceptions of intellectual property rights are not in accord with actual intellectual property law. This discord can destabilize the legitimacy and the effectiveness of intellectual property law.

The variance found here between public perception and intellectual property law indicates that potential intellectual property producers likely do not receive appropriate incentives to engage in creative endeavors, to work with others on creative projects, or to commercialize and distribute their intellectual work. Likewise, intellectual property users likely do not receive appropriate signals concerning compliance with intellectual property rights. These public perceptions are also highly likely to influence juror, as well as some judicial and legislative, decision-making concerning intellectual property rights. The intellectual property system will remain hard-pressed to achieve its objectives given the widespread disconnect between the public psychology of intellectual property and the reality of intellectual property law.

Intellectual property laws protect copyrights, trademarks, and patents and grant the owner somewhat of a monopoly to use those rights. Conversely, antitrust laws discourage any type of monopoly or behavior that would be considered anticompetitive. As expected, these two tenets of business in the United States inherently clash against each other at times.

This year, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has stepped up its enforcement of antitrust laws, bringing major lawsuits against companies including Amazon, Google, and Meta. Recent YouGov polling finds that most Americans support antitrust laws and believe that penalties for violating them should be increased. The vast majority hold negative views of monopolies, and while most believe there is at least some competition within U.S. industries, more than one-third believe it is not enough. Americans are far more likely to believe stricter antitrust enforcement would help the U.S. economy rather than hurt it — and the same holds for views on the effects of stricter enforcement on consumers, workers, and small businesses. Large companies, on the other hand, are more likely to be thought to be hurt by such laws rather than helped.

When asked broadly, most Americans (67%) say it is a bad thing for a single company to dominate a market; just 6% say it is good, 16% say neutral, and 11% aren't sure.

If you invent and successfully patent a product in the United States, it is typically protected from competition for 20 years. This intellectual property system, which is established in the U.S. Constitution, is intended to ​“promote the progress of science and useful arts” by rewarding innovation with a government-granted monopoly for a set period of time.

But today, drug manufacturers are exploiting loopholes in the system to extend their monopolies and stifle competition long beyond that 20-year timeline, which results in high and rising prescription drugs prices and undermines the very purpose of patent law. These anticompetitive behaviors contribute to a status quo of unaffordable prescription drugs where about a quarter of Americans report struggling to afford the drugs they are prescribed.

Concern over the cost of prescription drugs is becoming less of a policy issue and more of a “core value” for voters across party lines.

That’s the conclusion reached by Democrat Celinda Lake, president of Lake Research Partners, after a recent survey commissioned by the Campaign for Sustainable Rx Pricing, which found that a “vast majority” of voters (almost 70%) are worried about the cost of their medicines.

Five broad overarching themes and 11 subthemes were identified based on the articles’ foci. They were: trade agreements (divided into EU FTAs and those that include the USA); use of TRIPS flexibilities (divided into compulsory licencing and parallel importation); patent expiry/generic entry/generic pathway (divided into comparative studies and single country studies); patent policies (also divided into comparative studies and single country studies) and TRIPS-plus rules (divided into data exclusivity, patent term extensions and secondary patenting). Most studies focused not on specific trade agreements, but on TRIPS-plus provisions, which can also be found within some trade agreements.

The main finding of this review is that the stronger pharmaceutical monopolies created by TRIPs-plus intellectual property rules are generally associated with increased drug prices, delayed availability and increased costs to consumers and governments. There is evidence that TRIPS flexibilities can facilitate access to medicines although their use is limited to date. There were few studies that included resource poor settings, signalling a need for greater research in such settings where the impact on access to medicines is likely to be more damaging.

WASHINGTON (AP) — After an extended period of gloom, Americans are starting to feel better about inflation and the economy — a trend that could sustain consumer spending, fuel economic growth and potentially affect President Joe Biden’s political fortunes.

A measure of consumer sentiment by the University of Michigan has jumped in the past two months by the most since 1991. A survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that Americans’ inflation expectations have reached their lowest point in nearly three years. And the same survey, released last week, found that the proportion who expect their own finances to improve a year from now is at its highest level since June 2021.